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by ricksunny 372 days ago
OK this is amazeballs. Can you expound on technical implementation? Relying on Wikidata, then it relies on whatever Wikidata editors' internal governance system is for inclusion, exclusion, quality control of entries, correct?

I see you submitted this to HN almost a decade ago. How has it not gotten picked up for discussion??

1 comments

Thanks for the compliment! The larger graph is basically built by extracting all relationships of certain types (e.g. parent/child, teacher/student, cause/effect) from Wikidata, along with the earliest known date for the items (e.g. date of birth, time of invention/discovery). The layout started as a 3D force-directed layout, but I turned one axis into the timeline. For the visualization, I used (forked) https://github.com/anvaka/pm (which did get some deserved attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40817852 ) and the related ngraph.offline.layout repo.

Trying to answer your final question: there are a lot of things that I should probably improve here, but I've also wondered if this kind of giant graph visualization just doesn't really work for most people.